Companies that sell or distribute products or services typically provide customer service centers to handle inquiries from customers regarding their products or services. These inquiries can be questions regarding how to use or operate a product or can be complaints about product defects. Traditionally, customers have been provided with a telephone number (e.g., a 1-800 telephone number or a 1-900 telephone number) to call with such inquiries. An automatic call distributor (ACD) having software customized for a particular customer service center operation typically handles such telephone calls. The ACD provides call queuing functions and distributes the calls to available customer service representatives or agents. These customer service representatives are trained to respond to inquiries about a company's products or services. When the customer service center receives a large number of calls that might result in long queues and long customer hold times, the ACD may generate a message that informs callers that “All operators are busy. Please call back later.” In some circumstances, the ACD may generate a busy signal to incoming calls. Customers are also able to contact companies by regular mail using a customer service mailing address and, more recently, by electronic mail (e-mail) using an e-mail address.
It is very important that a company respond in a timely manner to customer inquiries. Toward this end, businesses generally attempt to ensure that sufficient customer service representatives are available to meet an expected number of customer inquiries. This expected need is determined based on historical data and takes into account seasonal variations (e.g., Christmas season), new product launches, etc. A failure to respond in a timely manner to customer inquiries generally leads to dissatisfied customers and a loss of customer loyalty. As noted above, customer inquiries may be made via different communications channels (e.g., telephone, regular mail, e-mail) and thus companies must ensure that a sufficient number of workers are available to handle inquiries made via each of these channels.
Thus, it is important for a business to have sufficient resources (i.e., customer service representatives) available to handle an expected number of tasks (i.e., customer service inquiries). In the case of telephone inquiries, for example, it is desirable to reduce queue time to reduce telecommunication charges to the company that are associated with calls to the 1-800 numbers of the business and to reduce adverse customer reaction. Of course, it is also desirable not to overstaff a customer service operation since this results in increased operating costs to the company. Thus, companies look to minimize the “available time” of the customer service representatives so that those representatives who are scheduled to be “on-phone” at a given time are actually handling telephone calls.
The resource management system of the present invention is an information system that stores, organizes the variety of staffing data sources, and delivers comprehensive functionality for resource management. The system includes a work plan builder module configured to build work plans for workers. The work plan builder module is configured to allow each worker to specify, for each of a plurality of different time periods, one of a plurality of different activities that the worker plans to perform during that time period. The work plans built by the work plan builder module are stored in a computer-accessible memory.
Such a system provides significant benefits in that it provides workers a degree of autonomy in choosing what they want to do and when they want to do it. The system also makes the workers the data source for work schedules and thereby takes advantage of the fact that the workers themselves are most likely to know what factors (e.g., doctor's appointments, vacation time) will affect their work schedules in the upcoming work period. Management personnel (e.g., team leaders and/or supervisors) are able to review the work plans to determine whether the work plans generated by the workers are sufficient to provide a desired service level for an expected work load. If necessary, the management personnel may re-allocate the resources.
Other modules are usable in conjunction with the work plan builder module. A real time status module provides comprehensive statistical information (updated periodically) regarding customer service center operations. A current day activity monitor module provides a real-time comparison between the current real-time requirements and the current period of the work plan. In this way, team leaders, and/or supervisors can be provided with real-time data as to the shortage or surplus of workers. A work force forecast module provides a comparison between the expected work volume and characteristics (as may be determined from algorithms based on historical data and/or seasonal data) and the work plans in order to communicate (e.g., visually) to team leaders, supervisors and/or workers whether sufficient workers are available to achieve the service level goal for the expected tasks. A supervision tool module permits team leads and/or supervisors to view, update and approve the work plans entered by the workers under their supervision or direction. A call center reporter module generates after-the-fact reports that compare the forecasted needs and the workers that planned to handle these forecasted needs with the actual needs and the workers that handled these actual needs.
These and many other advantages of the present invention will be more completely understood and appreciated by careful study of the following more detailed description of illustrative embodiments of the invention taken in conjunction with the accompanying drawings.